We got news this was going to happen last year, and now we finally have dates and a location. The East Coast RepRap Fest is happening June 22-24th in Bel Air, Maryland. What’s the East Coast RepRap Fest? Nobody knows; this is the first time it’s happening, and it’s not being produced by SeeMeCNC, the guys behind MRRF. There’s going to be a 3D printed Pinewood Derby, though, so that’s cool.

Intel hit with lawsuits over security flaws. Reuters reports Intel shareholders and customers had filed 32 class action lawsuits against the company because of Spectre and Meltdown bugs. Are we surprised by this? No, but here’s what’s interesting: the patches for Spectre and Meltdown cause a noticeable and quantifiable slowdown on systems. Electricity costs money, and companies (server farms, etc) can therefore put a precise dollar amount on what the Spectre and Meltdown patches cost them. Two of the lawsuits allege Intel and its officers violated securities laws by making statements or products that were false. There’s also the issue of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich selling shares after he knew about Meltdown, but before the details were made public. Luckily for Krzanich, the rule of law does not apply to the wealthy.

What does the Apollo Guidance Computer look like? If you think it has a bunch of glowey numbers and buttons, you’re wrong; that’s the DSKY — the user I/O device. The real AGC is basically just two 19″ racks. Still, the DSKY is very cool and a while back, we posted something about a DIY DSKY. Sure, it’s just 7-segment LEDs, but whatever. Now this project is a Kickstarter campaign. Seventy bucks gives you the STLs for the 3D printed parts, BOM, and a PCB. $250 is the base for the barebones kit.

I love me a good hackintosh, and every once in a while they get hardware right (at about six times the proper price point).

But Apple has shat all over the professional crowd while catering to people who want… phones that look gold?

My personal outrage against apple is that stupid magnetic charging port. I use my computer in a metalworking shop a lot, and it catches more iron filings than Wooly Willy and shorts itself out / gets too clogged to make contact and doesn’t charge. Why can’t everything just be USB?

The world’s not really full enough of iron filings to make the magnetic charger thing a problem. If you’re bringing your laptop into a metalwork room, it’s up to you to be smart enough to put it in a bag, or something. Keep it in it’s case, do your computing and your metalwork in different places. If you really must, put some tape over it.

That doesn’t count as most people’s problems. Tripping over leads sending the laptop flying is much more of one.

The magnetic charging port was one of the few good ideas that Apple brought to attention, a surpring number of computers get damaged by someone tripping over the leads…

As for the iron filings – speakers have magnets in them as well…
I do contract work for a factory, iron dust is the N1 cause of premature retirement of phones on the shop floor…very difficult to clean, basically you need a stronger magnet then the one in the speaker and you have to keep the big bad magnet from crushing the diaphragm, yet hold it close enough to pick up the magnetic crap. Then you get to do the fun part – cleaning your big magnet (hint – sticky tape FTW)

Compressed air? Have you even taken apart a modern phone down to bits that you can see speaker the membrane?
You’d either instantly shred it to bits or if take the pressure down do squat to the magnetic dust that’s stuck to the magnet…

Apple hardware is never really junk. It’s their software that often has the junk status. Overpriced though, sure
Their hardware does often have one specific bug/flaw each time though, and it’s best if it’s just silicone rings leaving marks since that’s at least externally fixable.

Though Tim Cook NEEDS to be sacked. Should be sacked . Why hasn’t he been sacked!

Or was he hand picked by Jobs to drive Apple into the ground effectively killing it. Jobs is dead and now Apple is as good as dead ( or will be at the rate Cook is recklessly driving the company towards the cliffs edge)

I’m on a used iMac with a 27″ 5K Retina display that is spectacular. It all just works. Unix and a great GUI. The only software I have paid for is Finalcut. I use KiCAD on a dual monitor Linux system and on the Mac. The Mac display is awesome for layouts.

What’s not to like? This modern disdain for Apple products sounds exactly like the naysayers in the 1980’s, like Jerry Pournell, who wrote every month about all the crap they had to do to keep their S100 CP/M or IBM PC MS-DOS systems working and said the Macs were worthless.

Price, man, price. You mention that your computer is used – there are many $ reasons for that. So basically with a PC you get much more in terms of performance for the same amount of cash. And you can choose from a number of operating systems to boot.

It was, IIRC, not cheap – $1800 or less and 2 years old. I figured it will cost about $200 a year over its lifetime in the business and maybe less. A 27″ 4K display for a PC is about $550 and a 5K LG 27″ is more like $1350. Then you need graphics hardware to drive 5K. How much is that? A couple hundred? So that is maybe $1500 from display and graphics. That leaves $300 for the case, mobo, 4GHz i7-4790, 16G RAM, PSU, and 1G hybrid drive. What would that cost in a DIY tower rig?

Apple needs to bring back a proper TOWER case Macintosh. Make it one with 5 or 6 x16 PCIe slots that are all full x16 connected. That would truly deserve to be called “Pro”, unlike the overhyped, overpriced trash can.

Or they should just quit the desktop/laptop hardware business and sell OS X for all x64 PCs. Their computers are just overpriced PCs since 2004, so why not?

5 or 6 truly x16 slots would demand very expensive server CPUs which actually have that many PCIe lanes to offer.
Currently there’s nothing that would demand all 16 lanes of gen 3 PCIe, x8 is more then satisfactory even for top of the line GPUs and gen 4 is in the making.
2 or 3 (possibly 4?) x8 slots would be more then enough…
What you really want is at least 4 NVMe M.2 sockets and some optimization for integrated “hardware” RAID5, so you can have something that would be worthy of premium price tag. (that or score a deal with Intel on something exclusive involving large Optane SSDs)

The all-in-one factor wouldn’t be all that bad if was done more like the competitor products, namely the HP Z-1…
!toolless! access to the guts (it even has gas struts to hold it open), most of the modules are removable without tools as well and NO FUCKING GLUE sploodged everywhere!
You even have a service manual telling you how to take stuff out without breaking it available for download straight from the manufacturer site, Fapple would rather eat cat turds then do that.

That is what Thunderbolt is for. Add RAM once maybe. The rest is network attached or USB3 or Thunderbolt. And mechanically very sound. My PC towers are so flimsy that I want to gut an old Mac Pro case. In fact, if someone made a MB to fit a Mac Pro case, that would be great. You can get them for $50.

Meh. Article mentions users using app-level encryption, but apparently ” these security measures can be circumvented relatively easily, with the help of decryption software.”

Nope. Good luck getting through HTTPS too, unless there’s a big hole in that I haven’t heard about. HTTPS is all over the place, partly for this reason.

He gets mild, generic information that’s sent unencrypted, such as server names. And that’s because of the REAL bug, the stupid habit devices have of connecting to any old Wifi network that’ll have them, often without even telling, never mind asking, the user. A user should know which Wifi is safe to connect to. Their ones at home and work, and if it’s a public one, put a poster up in the cafe with it’s name.

The article’s much less impressive than it thinks it is. Journalists, eh? Bunch of cunts.

It depends, with passive monitoring he won’t be able to retrieve any serious information. But with fake AP there are much more opportunities. In coffee shop he knows network name and password, so it’s easy to set up fake AP and deauth users and make them connect to it. And what do you think average user will do when Facebook is presented in plain HTTP or with warning that certificate doesn’t match site? Yeah, they will just click “just go there and don’t bother me with your techno details”. There is a saying “an S in WiFi stands for security” :)